Wellington Batucada wins the 2015 WOMAD Performer Competition
Check out the WOMAD website!!!
Dear Batucada friends and family, Bat-members past, present, and future…
It’s been one heck of a ride.
Over the past 8 weeks we have worked together on an awesome common goal – to win the opportunity to perform at WOMAD next year – a festival that we love and admire.
We’ve asked pretty much everyone we know to vote for us, and then we’ve asked a whole bunch of people we don’t know to vote for us too – through our regular gigs and special vote-collecting busking sessions all over Wellington and beyond.
It’s been a heck of a busy and full-on 2 months for all of us, and I think what has impressed me the most is the huge amount of original effort, creativity and sheer guts and determination that so many people have shown.
Whether it’s Facebooking or personally emailing every one of your friends, creating special WOMAD headgear, writing to everyone you can possibly think of who might be interested in supporting or endorsing us, talking to your famous friends and seeing if they’d like to support us too, chatting up strangers in the coffee bar or at the bus stop, busking your ass off at every opportunity, or coming up with a million other ideas of how we can gather those elusive, precious, hard-won votes – we’ve all worked as a team and we’ve all produced an amazing result in terms of the number of votes we’ve gained.
I never thought we’d get quite so many! I was hoping for 2,000, so we’ve well and truly smashed that figure.
WELL DONE EVERYONE. Our final score is 2,643 votes.
I also want to congratulate all of the other bands who took part in this competition. We know how hard you all worked and how much effort you put into gathering your own votes. It was an honour to compete alongside you.
….and thanks a million to every one of those 2,643 people who voted for us. YOU ROCK!
I love you, you crazy, mad, creative, funky, rhythmically-talented group of awesome awesome people.
Wellington Batucada is bloody amazing.
Media coverage
Announcement from WOMAD this morning:
Taking out the WOMAD Performer Competition with a steady lead from the get-go, 20 members of Wellington Batucada will bring the flamboyant world of samba from Brazil to Taranaki.
Originally formed in 2001, Wellington Batucada endeavors to replicate the authentic samba sound playing a variety of Brazilian rhythms including samba batucada, partido alto, samba reggae, samba funk, and baion.
WOMAD website, 04 December 2014
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